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The Secure Shell (SSH) and Secure Copy (SCP) make remotely performing system administration and copying files across secure links a painless operation. SSH and SCP use the same SSH protocol to protect network communications, but they rely on users knowing if they want a shell or to copy a file beforehand. You cannot easily use an existing SSH shell connection to a remote machine and just grab one or two files; if you want the files, you'll have to make another SSH connection for the file copy using SCP -- unless you have ssh-xfer.